Music database importing help

[Ton_loc]

Hello all. I'm a newbie at Xlobby, and have been playing with it for about a 2 weeks. I'm getting going, but a have some questions about importing my music into the database. The basic structure of my music is as follows:

\\Genre\Artist\Artist - Album\Track# - Artist - Song.mp3

I'm trying to import my music so the DB is structured as follows

Artist\Album\Songs

Everything works pretty well when I click the "Use Directory Structure" radio button before importing, but I'm not quite sure how the info is actually getting into the database. If I had a better understanding of the underlying code, I could manipulate things much better.

I'm going to describe what I THINK is happening. Please let me know if I am misunderstanding things:
When the date is imported using the directory structure, the highest levels of the database are created based on the folder names. If the folder has no music files directly under it, a category is created with name and date information. This continues down into the folders until a folder is reached which does have a music file. When the music file is found, the ID3 info in the music files is used to populate the artist, song name, track number, album name, etc. fields for both the folder which contains the music file and the actual individual song entries, themselves. Is this correct?

Ideally, what I want is a music page which lists the artists. When I click on the artist, I'd like to see a page of the available albums by that artist. I'm not quite there yet, but I think that by understanding how the info is imported I can reach my goal.

Alternately, is there a way that I can simply have the DB importer analyze only the ID3 tags and assemble everything from that? I've been pretty meticulous in tagging my files, but when I try to use the "Artist>Album" or "Genre>Artist>Album" radio buttons to populate the DB I get very strange results (I'm not at my home computer right now so I can't give better details than that right no).

Thanks for the help!

[Colby]

Did you ever figure this out?

[Ton_loc]

I have it mostly figured out. I used the 'Use Directory Structure' button and got all of my music imported just about the way I want it. The only problem is that in my bigger directories the directory organization didn't quite work right. I have 2 genres which have 100 to 200 artists in them. For some reason, the large directories aren't properly alphabetized when they get imported. I need to play around with the settings some more to see if I can fix the problem.

Unfortunately, my media server (a Linux box in the basement) is on the fritz right now, so my Xlobby pursuits are slowed down for the moment. The raid controller, mdadmin, REMOVES any drive which gets an ECC error, rather than sparing and re-writing the bad sector(s). So, 2 ECC errors in about a day will kill the entire array on a raid 5. Argh . But, this isn't a Lunix forum, so I'll stop my rant there.

I'm going to give more attention to my database importing after I get the server up and running again.

[Ton_loc]

Well, I thought I was close to figuring thing out. I wasn't.

After playing around for an hour or so last night, I can get all of my data imported properly, but I can't get it sorted the way I want. I'm importing my music using the "Use Directory Structure" option. I was hoping this would allow me to get away from the suggested flat directory structure for music. As I said before, my music is organizes as follows:

Genre\Artist\Artist-Album\mp3's

I've gone through my music and made sure that the top 2 levels (Genre and Artist) don't have any mp3s in their folders, only other folders. I though this might have been causing a problem, but now I'm not so sure.

My problem is that I can't get the database sorted the way I want. Inspection of the database shows that I have the following fields:

Folders with no mp3s have "date", "name", and "directory"
Folders with mp3s have "artist", "albumname", "genre", "year"
Individual mp3s have "tracknumber", "trackname", "trackfilename", and "artist"

Can someone explain to me how the databases are sorted and how this applied to directory structures which aren't flat? Does the first sort parameter apply to the top database level, and the second parameter the second level, and so on? Or, are they just primary and secondary (and so on) sorting parameters for the top database level? The top 2 levels of my music are folders named according to genre and artist, so I thought that using "directory:directory" would sort the first level based on my genre-named directories and the second level based on my artist-named directories. The do get sorted that way, but they aren't alphabetized correctly. Also, even though all of my "name" and "directory" values are exactly the same for all of my database entries, "directory:directory" and "name:name" produce different results.

I'm really confused now. Can someone offer any insight? Or, is there a way I can open the code and figure things out myself?